The Blackwater Lightship

I can tell you about my father's voyage on his boat, because I was with him all the time. It was a rather strange voyage, with no ocean or sea crossing, not even a lock to pass through... The boat stayed at home and so did my father. But that does not mean there was no adventure...

After the death of the paranoid emperor Tiberius, Caligula, his heir, seizes power and plunges the empire into a bloody spiral of madness and depravity.

Comedy drama about a family reunion written by and starring Richard Herring. It's Ken and Margaret Snell's 45th wedding anniversary and their children and grandchildren along gather to celebrate. For Ken and Margaret's children, it's a day to revisit childhood arguments and to paper over present-day fractures in their relationships.

Dinithi tries very hard to communicate with her husband, but he ignores her presence relentlessly. The harder she tries to reach him, the deeper his silence becomes. Their 8 year old daughter watches them. Her parents try to get involved but receive the same silent treatment from him.

Bauji resists his daughter's request to let her marry the man she loves as the villagers incessantly shame him. However, his opinion changes after he meets him and he decides to change his viewpoint.

East Berlin, shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall. Kurt Schröder and his family dig a tunnel to escape to West Berlin as they struggle to overcome the obstacles blocking their underground path to freedom.

A thirteen-year-old French girl deals with moving to a new city and school in Paris, while at the same time her parents are getting a divorce.

A young French teenage girl after moving to a new city falls in love with a boy and is thinking of having sex with him because her girlfriends have already done it.

A disturbed, aging Southern belle moves in with her sister for solace — but being face-to-face with her brutish brother-in-law accelerates her downward spiral.

A family loaded with quirky, colorful characters piles into an old van and road trips to California for little Olive to compete in a beauty pageant.

A retired farmer and widower in his 70s, Alvin Straight learns one day that his distant brother Lyle has suffered a stroke and may not recover. Alvin is determined to make things right with Lyle while he still can, but his brother lives in Wisconsin, while Alvin is stuck in Iowa with no car and no driver's license. Then he hits on the idea of making the trip on his old lawnmower, thus beginning a picturesque and at times deeply spiritual odyssey.

George, host of a television show focusing on literature, receives videos shot on the sly that feature his family, along with disturbing drawings that are difficult to interpret. He has no idea who has made and sent him the videos. Progressively, the contents of the videos become more personal, indicating that the sender has known George for a long time.

Zed is an American vault-cracker who travels to Paris to meet up with his old friend Eric. Eric and his gang have planned to raid the only bank in the city which is open on Bastille day. After offering his services, Zed soon finds himself trapped in a situation beyond his control when heroin abuse, poor planning and a call-girl named Zoe all conspire to turn the robbery into a very bloody siege.

Four high school teachers launch a drinking experiment: upholding a constant low level of intoxication.

Young love and childish fears highlight a year in the life of a turn-of-the-century family up to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

Ten years after being thrown out of her parental home, Nur hears that her mother is at death's door. Taking her young daughter with her, Nur hurries back to her father's world to see, and reconcile with her mother before it is too late. While the universal theme of mother-daughter relationships lies at the centre of the film, this is underpinned by an allusive subtext of incest, one of most common but least addressed social problems in Turkey. The individual stories of the family members combine with a sense of hope fuelled by tragedy to paint a portrait of the socially disconnected.

A teenager journeys through a series of foster homes after her mother goes to prison for committing a crime of passion.

The Baker brood moves to Chicago after patriarch Tom gets a job coaching football at Northwestern University, forcing his writer wife, Mary, and the couple's 12 children to make a major adjustment. The transition works well until work demands pull the parents away from home, leaving the kids bored -- and increasingly mischievous.

This film is about what the routine of everyday life can do to the human mind and psyche. It also reflects on the importance of the choices we make and how limited these choices are in the first place. The plot evolves around a family of four. They live in the suburbs, in a strange villa that appears, through a complex game of mirrors, to be more like a piece of installation art than a real house. The main character, who hardly appears on screen, is the son, a man in his thirties. Suffering from asthma and eczema since childhood, he uses his condition to manipulate his parents and his sister. Thus the existence of the terrorized family turns into an endless ritual of attempting to satisfy his whims, and always on the alert for yet another one of his “health crises”. Las Meninas resembles the scattered pieces of a puzzle. It is up to the viewer to assemble them in order to form his very own picture – something that makes the film itself personal and unique.

Oskar Roehler's drama Der Alte Affe Angst (Angst) is about the dissolution of a couple. Robert (Andre Hennicke) and Marie (Marie Baumer) have little in common other than their sex life. Since Robert is going through a bout with impotency, they are having a very rocky time. Robert learns that his father, whom he is estranged from, has died. This disturbs Robert so much that he visits a prostitute, and is able to engage in sex with her. Marie discovers the infidelity, and the prostitute has a surprise of her own. Angst was screened at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival.